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Hypocrisy isn’t the important thing here. Ideological failure is.
The title of this post comes from an excellent diary at Daily Kos, that you should read. It’s great not just on it’s main point about Ayn Rand accepting Medicare and Social Security, but more...
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White Working Class, Progressive Fatalism and the Perils of Polling
In the Democratic Strategist, Andrew Levinson (pdf) tries to bring some reality to discussion of the white working class, which is generally stereotypes as monolithic and regressive. This is more...
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The Uses, and Abuses, of the Term ‘Markets’
When you come down to it, the word market is a negation. It is a word to be applied to the context of any transaction so long as that transaction is not directly dictated by the state. The word has...
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The Economics-Politics Distinction: The Shift from the Welfare to the...
If “economics” is isolated from other aspects of social life, then the criterion for policymakers becomes the simple one of efficiency. Expenditure, and government policy generally, is to be viewed in...
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What Would a Real ‘Right to Work’ Look Like?
I just asked this question on Twitter, and realized I wasn’t going to be able to explain it in 140 characters. So I thought I’d elaborate here. First, the question: What do people think about...
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How the NRA Shifted the Debate: Or One Way Conservatives are Better at Politics
I’ve harped here on the notion, both popular and academic, that ‘talk’ doesn’t matter – that decisions are the key unit of politics, they are action, driven by some set of fundamental forces,...
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Top Five Posts that No One Read: 2012
I may post the top posts from the past year based on views, but I first thought I might do a list of posts that didn’t get much traffic that I wish had. Here they are, in no particular order. [This...
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‘Markets’ Obscure Questions of Justice
There is no ‘neutral’ or ‘free’ position: the market is regulated one way or the other. And in either case, there will be economic consequences, concrete distributions of wealth….The question, at the...
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How the Media Convinces Us ‘The People Support It’– Mass Surveillance and Polls
[Updated Below] [Update II: 6-13-13] On Sunday, I noticed (and tweeted) that Steve Kornacki kept saying that Americans strongly supported all manner of spying on Americans in the name of terror, moving...
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Gender, Class and Economic Fairness: Blaming Voters is a Cop Out
Laura Bassett and Dave Jamieson have a piece on Democratic strategy, Minimum Wage, Sick Leave Rebranded As Women’s Issues To Pressure GOP that I find troubling (the strategy, not the piece). Pelosi and...
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Independence Day
My hope for Independence Day is that we can start with the small step of calling this day Independence Day, not Fourth of July. It strikes me how odd it is to refer to the day by its date. I suspect...
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The Patriot Act, ‘support’ for public policies and the construction of...
Not long ago, I argued that how poll questions are often framed, and more important, how they are interpreted in the media, worked to reinforce the status quo, specifically on the issue of mass...
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Entitlement Means Right
By U.S. Government [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsDemocrats* have gotten at least part of the message–language matters. They know the GOP has long been using language to advance their agenda,...
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Anderson on Democratic Equality
There must be a better way [than luck egalitarianism] to conceive of the point of equality. To do so it is helpful to recall how egalitarian political movements have historically conceived of their...
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Defending Social Insurance: Solidarity is More Powerful than Individualism
I recently argued against a common framing when it comes to fending off attacks on Social Security and Medicare, which come in the form of referring to these programs as “entitlements” which must be...
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Against “The War Against X”
I’ve been complaining about the framing of the various “War(s) Against X.” So I thought it worth talking a bit about why. Listening to political discussions, there seem to be wars everywhere. There’s a...
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Top Posts for 2013
Here they are–the top posts, based on views, for 2013. 1. Blaming Consumers is a Cop Out This is the no contest the most read piece this year, also the most comments for a post. It included a shout...
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I am outraged at David Brooks’ continuing execution of the War on Drugs
[Updated below] [If you read my piece entitled I’m so outraged at Kim Kardashian for maintaining the 5th Fleet in a human rights violating autocracy, some of this may be familiar.] Someone who doesn’t...
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Democracies, Republics and Mistaken Pedantry
You may have noticed that I have referred to “popular governments” in Greece, Rome, and Italy. To designate their popular governments, the Greeks, as we saw, invented the term democracy. The Romans...
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Americans Remain Divided on Completely Meaningless Question
A recent Gallup poll (h/t Jonathan Cohn) provides another illustration of a point I’ve made before–view of Americans as presented in the media are a product of the weird sorts of questions asked by...
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